You wouldn’t expect any book charging itself with the not-inconsiderable task of documenting fifteen decades of fashion to be anything less than weighty; lifting Charlotte Seeling’s sizable 512-page encyclopedia Fashion: 150 Years of Couturiers, Designers, Labels (Ullmann, due out on January 15) requires positively Herculean levels of strength. And with more than 500 illustrations, it’s unlikely you’ll be cradling the Kindle version in your hands anytime soon. (Your device would crash with the same resounding thump if you’d let this tome slip to the floor.) That aside, Seeling’s walk down the runways of history is worth a look for its broad sweep (from Belle Epoque curves to the twenty-first-century epoch with the likes of Haider Ackermann) and some great images (check out the futuristic Courrèges shifts, structured Schiaparelli dresses and simple Balenciaga box jackets, all photographed by Vogue and here in our slideshow above). That’s the upside. The down? While there are plenty of case-study chapters devoted to individual designers—Alaia, Lagerfeld, McQueen, and McCartney—talents like Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein don’t, bizarrely, earn similar treatment here. And, to these eyes at least, there didn’t need to be pages devoted to Wolfgang Joop. Still, given this was originally published in Germany, that probably explains the support for Seeling’s home team.